'November 20th.—To-day I have finished the last of my New Testament tracts, the last at any rate for a time. While Ancrum lives I have resolved to suspend them. They trouble him deeply; and I, who owe him so much, will not voluntarily add to his burden. His wife is with him, a somewhat heavy, dark-faced woman, with a slumbrous eye, which may, however, be capable of kindling. They have left Mortimer Street, and have gone to live in a little house on the road to Cheadle. He seems perfectly happy, and though the doctor is discouraging, I at least can see no change for the worse. She sits by him and reads or works, without much talking, but is all the time attentive to his lightest movement. Friends send them flowers which brighten the little house, his "boys" visit him in the evenings, he is properly fed, and altogether I am more happy about him than I have been for long. It required considerable courage, this move, on her part; for there are a certain number of people still left who knew Ancrum at college, and remember the story; and those who believed him a bachelor are of course scandalised and wondering. But the talk, whatever it is, does not seem to molest them much. He offered to leave Manchester, but she would not let him. "What would he do away from you and his boys?" she said to me. There is a heroism in it all the same.
'... So my New Testament work may rest a while.—During these autumn weeks, it has helped me through some terrible hours.
'When I look back over the mass of patient labour which has accumulated during the present century round the founder of Christianity and the origins of his society—when I compare the text-books of the day with the text-books of sixty years ago—I no longer wonder at the empty and ignorant arrogance with which the French eighteenth century treated the whole subject. The first stone of the modern building had not been laid when Voltaire wrote, unless perhaps in the Wolfenbuttel fragments. He knew, in truth, no more than the Jesuits, much less in fact than the better men among them.
'... It has been like the unravelling of a piece of fine and ancient needlework—and so discovering the secrets of its make and craftsmanship. A few loose ends were first followed up; then gradually the whole tissue has been involved, till at last the nature and quality of each thread, the purpose and the skill of each stitch, are becoming plain, and what was mystery rises into knowledge.
'... But how close and fine a web!—and how difficult and patient the process by which Christian reality has to be grasped! There is no short cut—one must toil.
'But after one has toiled, what are the rewards? Truth first—which is an end in itself and not a means to anything beyond. Then—the great figure of Christianity given back to you—with something at least of the first magic, the first "natural truth" of look and tone. Through and beyond dogmatic overlay, and Messianic theory and wonder-loving addition, to recover, at least fragmentarily, the actual voice, the first meaning, which is also the eternal meaning, of Jesus—Paul—"John"!
'Finally—a conception of Christianity in which you discern once more its lasting validity and significance—its imperishable place in human life. It becomes simply that preaching of the Kingdom of God which belongs to and affects you—you, the modern European—just as Greek philosophy, Stoic or Cynic, was that preaching of it which belonged to and affected Epictetus.'
'November 24th.—Mr. O'Kelly writes to me to-day his usual hopeless report. No news! I do not even know whether she is alive, and I can do nothing—absolutely nothing.
'Yes—let me correct myself, there is some news of an event which, if we could find her, might simplify matters a little. Montjoie is dead in hospital—at the age of thirty-six—
'Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament? As I look back on the whole course of my relation to Louie, I am conscious only of a sickening sense of utter failure. Our father left her to me, and I have not been able to hold her back from—nay, I have helped to plunge her into the most obvious and commonplace ruin. Yet I am always asking myself, if it were to do again, could I do any better? Has any other force developed in me which would make it possible for me now to break through the barriers between her nature and mine, to love her sincerely, asking for nothing again, to help her to a saner and happier life?